All night outside my hotel window
snow dusted the traffic lanes
& crosswalk chirps marked the air
like the sound of your snaps undone.
Our lines crisscross a like clearing
where they began – lat/long, timestamped
first meeting / last glance – streaked
hot from your eyes to mine
so when I uncross your legs from memory
while you open the line of your lips
to admit a likeness of my tongue
& rigid semblance of my own marker,
your mouth-caresses & finger-kisses
drawing familiar utterances
prized for the unfamiliar sketch
traced in the air above you,
I call upon jewelry poems,
marriage, thousand mile treks
to Catalina trails & unmarked ellipses
of Manhattan-return refractions
to amplify the distant alto
of your songbird arc,
which bounds how far I can travel
before losing sight lines
drawn in the moon's light snowfall;
as you, uncrossed, penetrated,
savage a body tensed, naked -- mine --
with lines moaned from across
the divide of another,
critique of my lovemaking's art writ large,
unpluralized charcoal monotone,
unexaggerated claims of your carnal need.
I am but husband, guest, single light-line
bent by dual magnets: unshamed desire
& spectacle imagined from another country,
quarks & shards of a stick world.
At the instant of climax
-- yours or his -- I watch a woman
bundled thick against the cold
stumble into a snow bank
then look dreamily up toward me
as if anticipating the lines she must speak
-- zipper-line down her back -- faint reflection
of your uncrossed, searing presence.